However carefull we are, however much effort engineers and scientists put into trying to prevent accidents, there is one certain thing – ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN.

 

The problem with nuclear power accidents is they have the potential to be catastrophic. 

 

The one thing that all nuclear accidents have in common is that they are covered up where possible, and where not possible the severity is played down by the Nuclear Industry and politicians. The truth only emerges years after the accident. Here are the chilling details of just a few of the more well known accidents...

 

Windscale 10th October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Milk from about 500 km2 (190 square miles) of the nearby countryside was diluted and destroyed for about a month due to concerns about its contamination by ionising radiation . Wikipedia

 

 Three Mile island March 28th 1979 A failure in the cooling system led to a partial meltdown in a reactor and release of radioactive gases. (Years later it was proved the plant was within ½ hour to an hour of a total meltdown.) Pregnant women and pre school age children were advised to evacuate. This led to 100,00 people leaving the area. History.com 

 

Chernobyl April 26th 1986 An explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 spread a radioactive cloud over large parts of the Soviet Union, now the territories of Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Nearly 8.4 million people in the three countries were exposed to the radiation. The effect was significant in Britain for years after. Sheep which grazed on mountain sides in North wales and Cumbria had to be killed and disposed of every year for 26 years as they were eating radioactive grass. BBC News

 

Fukushima 11th March 2011 The huge tsunami which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese along the coast also caused the cooling system failure at Fukushima Nuclear Power plant. 154,00 evacuated in a 30 km radius around the plant.

History.com

 

Kyshtym, Russia 1957 – Level 6 The Kyshtym Nuclear disaster was a radiation contamination incident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a Nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the Soviet Union. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the INES, making it the third most serious Nuclear disaster ever recorded behind the Chernobyl Disaster and Fukushima Daiichi Disaster. The event occurred in the town of Ozyorsk, a closed city built around the Mayak plant. Since Ozyorsk/Mayak was not marked on maps, the disaster was named after Kyshtym, the nearest known town.

environmentandsociety.org 

 

Saint- Laurent, France 1969 – Level 4 On the 17th October, 1969 50 kg of uranium in one of the gas cooled reactors began to melt. This was classified as Level 4 on the INES and to this day remains the most serious civil Nuclear disaster in France that we know about.

 

There have been 33 serious incidents and accidents at nuclear power stations since the first recorded one in 1952 at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada. Guardian report.